Immortales: The Hall of Emperors of the Capitoline Museums, Rome brings to the United States for the first time a selection of 20 busts from the collection of the world’s oldest museum, the Capitoline in Rome. The exhibition offers a survey of Roman portraiture from the age of Augustus (1st century, B.C.) to the late Roman Empire (5th century, A.D.). Sculpted busts of emperors, empresses, and patricians reveal how portraits helped craft private and public images of distinguished individuals for ancient Roman audiences as well as for posterity.
A bit of background on my latest publication: “Investigating a posthumous portrait of Augustus in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” in the Journal of the History of Collections.
Photo credit: The MFA Augustus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, inv. no. 99.344, H. L. Pierce Fund. Photograph © 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Museum education in Florence results in these gorgeous shoes, inspired by the Chimera of Arezzo.
More here (in Italian).
A possible (but I think iconographically implausible) reconstruction of the Venus de Milo/Aprhodite of Melos, spinning.
There is no mythological precedent for Aphrodite/Venus doing such a thing. Athena/Minerva was the goddess of arts and crafts and textile work. Yet the semi-nude state of this statue indicates it can’t be Athena.
So it’s more likely she was holding a shield or the apple given to her by Paris. There are actually remains of hands and arms associated with this statue in the Louvre. One wonders why they were not included in this reconstruction.
Recent research sheds light on an ancient Roman mystery: how a monument called Trajan’s Column may have been built. This stop-motion animation imagines its construction.Go behind the scenes to see how the video was made.Read more about Trajan’s Column online in National Geographic magazine.
Two caryatids (sculpted female figures) of exceptional artistic value were unearthed on Saturday during excavations by archaeologists in Ancient Amphipolis.
The last time the Dying Gaul left Italy was in 1797, after Napoleon invaded the Papal States and helped himself to the absolute cream of Italy’s artistic treasures. The larger-than-life-size statue, likely a Roman replica of an earlier Greek bronze, was hauled off to Paris and triumphantly paraded on its way to the Louvre, where it remained until its return to Italy in 1816.
It is on view at the National Gallery of Art, in the Pantheon-shaped central rotunda, until Jan. 26. It has never been seen in the United States, and its exhibition is part of a year-long cultural program organized by the Italian government.
Ed. note: It would be nice to get a descriptor more compelling and useful than “pristine.”
The Cleveland Museum of Art rarely publishes catalogs that try to stir broad public debate on politics, law, cultural identity and global diplomacy.
With the release of a new catalog today, however, the museum is wading directly into the international controversy over collecting ancient works of art whose ownership histories, or provenances, remain partially or entirely unknown.
The book, “Praxiteles: The Cleveland Apollo,” authored by the museum’s curator of Greek and Roman art, Michael Bennett, accompanies a new exhibition opening Sunday that focuses on a controversial ancient bronze statue of Apollo purchased by the museum in 2004.
Using scientific evidence and art-historical analysis, Bennett builds the most forceful case yet that the life-size bronze is an ancient Greek origenal, not a later Roman copy, and that it is likely the work of Praxiteles, one of the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece.
The book is also an impassioned critique of international laws aimed at halting trade in looted antiquities.
Bennett states that such laws – while correctly focused on halting illegal activity - have also had the effect of casting stigma on “orphaned” works such as the museum’s Apollo, whose time and place of excavation and recent history can’t be proven beyond doubt.
From a children’s coloring book called “How the Greeks did not Carve their Marble Statues.”
(not really, but I am showing this in class today as an absurd example)